One of the mild amusements that comes as a result of having a Web site with a feedback form that allows people to send me messages is that people will attempt to use that form to post advertising to my site, in hopes that thereby thousands of otherwise benighted netsurfers will be exposed to the life-giving sunlight that is the poster's pet project he's been working on in his basement for years. When someone tries this, I will write back to say hey, sorry, but advertising of that sort is not welcome here, and by the way, would you kindly fuck off and fall over?

The fellow this morning is a case in point. He used the feedback form to post a longish message about some Web site that exists to helps sufferers of social phobia. Fine and dandy. Except that it was an ad, and it had nothing to do with any of the topics of my site. So I responded with the requisite request for the poster to fuck off and blah blah blah.

So the guy writes back almost immediately to tell me tough shit, buddy, it didn't say anywhere that I couldn't send you an ad, so you must either hate the mentally ill or love your own mental illness so much that you don't want anything to threaten it. And oh yeah, I don't want my ad associated with anyone so hateful, so would you please remove it from your message board.

It's the request for me to remove his ad from my message board that kills me. Why? Because there is no fucking message board, numbfuck! All the feedback form does is send me email.

At work, we're launching a significant upgrade to the site tomorrow, we still have a ton of development and testing to do today, the two big bossmen from D.C. are in the office, and they're taking us out for our office holiday shindig at 4:30 this afternoon and reportedly want to "party" with the New York crew, whatever that means.

Thus it was that, as superstitious as I am not, my step faltered a bit this morning while I was walking down 30th Street in Astoria on my way to the subway. A furry, glossy cat, black as a moonless country night, emerged from a driveway a bit further along and paced back and forth along the edge of the sidewalk as if weighing its optionsor mine. I kept a close eye on it. I had come within ten feet or so of it when it made it choice and sauntered casually across my path to the garbage bags at the curb.

As I say, I am not superstitious, and it's a good thing, too. It really was a beautiful cat, and a pleasure to look at.

Categories:

Damn, but City Hall Station is beautiful, even the limited views you have of it when you ride an out-of-service #6 train past the line's terminus at Brooklyn Bridge.

The startling thing about it, and what I never would have guessed from the photos I've seen, is how small and constricted it is. I had always pictured it as a place of cavernous grandeur. Grand it is, even now. Cavernous it is not.